Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 15, 1990 TAG: 9005150060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: PURCHASE, N.Y. LENGTH: Medium
Terry Hofler decided his sixth graders at Alexander Burger school in the South Bronx would do "Romeo and Juliet."
Many girls wanted to be Juliet. (Of course. Juliet is the sun.) Few boys were willing to be Romeo. (Of course. Romeo wears tights and likes girls.)
Hofler chose Reinaldo Santiago as Romeo, which gave Reinaldo an uneasy feeling at first. "I thought, you know it would be . . . " said Reinaldo. "At first I thought . . . You know. You know . . . I thought it would be . . . " Reinaldo whispered: "Not so mannish. After a while as I was doing the play it looks like it wouldn't be embarrassing."
The first time Richard Kurtzberg, a Katonah teacher, went over "Merry Wives of Windsor," Ryan Dwyer didn't pay much attention until the song near the end, (Fie on lust and luxury! Lust is but a bloody fire). Ryan looked up and said, "Wow! Who wrote that?" (Ryan was even more impressed when he heard the author has been dead 374 years.)
There are many little bumps on the way to the festival at the state university campus here.
Julia Oestreich, a fifth grader in the Extraordinary Learners program in Stamford, Conn., was hoping for something big, but was cast as a servant in "Taming of the Shrew."
After rehearsal one day, she said: "Dad, I don't want to go to rehearsal for just one line. It's not that important. Someone else can do it." But her father told her she should stick to her commitments. It turned out she loved her costume and by curtain, her father was saying, "Julia keeps rehearsing her line."
Break a leg? A week before the festival Romeo was absent from school. Hofler called Romeo's mother and heard the words a director fears most: "Reinaldo has chicken pox." But he made it.
Break a leg? The Shrew had mononucleosis. "But I never missed one rehearsal," said Krista Morgan. "Even when I was very weak."
They learn Shakespeare and they learn something of life.
Asked her favorite part of "Romeo and Juliet," Morriah Christian recited: "A man, young lady; lady, such a man."
"Why? It's my line."
This is the festival's fifth year. There is always a waiting list to enter. The sponsors, prompters and volunteers who seek to teach love of the arts, have learned that if Shakespeare is explained slowly and carefully and if you choose a play with a couple of sword fights or a poison potion, children love it.
Not only was Luke Miller a ghost, he was a ghost with a sword. To relax before "Hamlet" began, he ran after fellow thespians shouting, "I'll send you to the paramedics."
Lindsay Glauber, Gertrude in "Hamlet," said: "Yeah I did like being poisoned. I thought it was pretty fun."
Each of the 16 schools puts on a play that is shortened, but uses all Shakespearian language.
Everything is tightly orchestrated. Within minutes of killing themselves Pyramus and Thisbe of Mamaroneck Avenue School were back in the audience watching the next play.
When Larry Cuccio, a servant in "Timon of Athens," saw Doug Cilento, the lion in "Midsummer Night's Dream," which had just ended, Larry whispered, "Nice play."
Eric Rinaldi, (Pyramus in "Midsummer Night's Dream") fell down and stood up three times before dropping dead.
Alex Bush dipped Krista for the kissing scene at the end of "Taming of the Shrew." Later, Krista would say: "We just dipped, we didn't kiss, 'cause we hate each other. Also I have mono, remember?"
But it was hard not to be particularly moved by the Bronx school's "Romeo and Juliet."
Hofler had picked it because he believed the school's black and Puerto Rican students would relate to bad blood between the Capulets and Montagues.
His Romeo is Puerto Rican, his Juliet, Rasheeda Walcott, is black.
Many of them speak two languages but Elizabethan English is not one of them. Yet Hofler did not worry. "I'll give Reinaldo an idea and he can soar with it," he said.
"At first," said Reinaldo, "some of the parts, we didn't understand what we were saying. So they explained to us so we could put our feeling into the words."
Hofler chose little Mary Ann Feliciano of the South Bronx to deliver the final lines. He knew what he was doing.
In an unmistakable Puerto Rican accent, she recited: "For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo."
When she was done, there wasn't a person in the room who heard those 400-year-old words who didn't feel a little hope for humanity.
by CNB